Impossible to overstate the importance of the whirlwind which has destroyed the whole rotten edifice

VHeadline's Washington DC-based commentarist Chris Herz writes: If nothing else revealed the hapless helplessness of the incoming US regime of Barack Obama the retention of Robert Gates as Secretary of War showed that elections here do not matter: Likewise the appointment of Admiral Blair to head the Central Intelligence Agency.

The real master of the USA is its military which has finally staked out a power base independent even of the industrial and financial elites which hitherto have more or less controlled it.

What is really going on here represents the iron determination of the military to maintain their positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, to somehow find a way to victory despite a clear tactical defeat in the one country and a massively expensive and destructive Soviet-style stalemate in the other.

Just as in the dying days of the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany real power was assumed by General Erich Ludendorff, so now does the US military finally achieve mastery over the rest of our state.

The events of our late elections have shown that the US population were allowed by significant portions of the elites to express a skepticism as to the direction of the campaign for global hegemony. We most certainly were not permitted the opportunity to actually reject this vicious militarism, colonialism, conquest, whatever you might call it. No indeed.

This reorganization of the US state as a weapon pointed at the heads of all the rest of humanity has gone so far as to obviate any possibility that the USA might become one day a normal country; one living quietly within her own borders, respectful of the rights and property of others and attentive to the needs of her people as an whole rather than merely the boundless appetites of the bounders who are our real rulers.

We have for generations now squandered our lives our fortunes and our sacred honor in the construction of weapon after weapon, and we cannot afford for one instant a real change in direction, we are only allowed to get rid of the worst of the stupidest incompetants of the extreme right.

The idea is that frontmen less notoriously associated with the spreading of death and destruction throughout the world should have their chance to serve as human camouflage for the warfare state.

There is as well a grudging admission that however useful to the elite is the disciplined obedience of the Christian evangelical to authority, to wealth and to power, inadequate to the situation is a state bureaucracy recruited from those whose intellectual abilities are organized around a clear understanding that our most important priority is the preparation for the holy wars of the Rapture, assuring the protection of the fetus and the teaching of creation science in the schools.

And what a desperate situation it is. We see along with outright tactical defeat in Iraq a looming disaster in Afghanistan ... and all this as the financial underpinnings of the imperial state are being shattered by its own excesses of corruption and violence.

• It is impossible to overstate the importance of the whirlwind which has destroyed the whole rotten edifice of corporatism.

But the good part here, and it is an ill wind indeed that blows no one no good, is that the USA must continue to exhaust what remains of her resources in a vain struggle amongst countless millions of hostile Muslims thousands of kilometers removed from the historic Schwerpunkt of her empire.

We might survive for a time as a major power even with the loss of our exposed and vulnerable positions in the Middle East and in the wild mountains of Central Asia. But we cannot live without our dominion over Latin America. And even this is now threatened for the first time since the days of James Monroe as we have so clearly seen in the lately adjourned meeting of the Latin presidents.

A successful leadership in Venezuela or elsewhere will navigate the shoals left behind by a submerging empire with a clear understanding that we are witnessing as profound a change in world leadership as was that after the First World War, when dynasties which had directed the affairs of millions for centuries abruptly disappeared.

The inability of the US to really change her direction and her historic polity by her own internal constitutional means assures her destruction and thus the creation of a power-vacuum already most evident in Latin America where even once-supine satellite states in Central America or the Caribbean must seek sustenance from Venezuela or Brazil.

I was born a citizen of the Great Republic when Franklin D. Roosevelt was her president.

For long years I watched in horror the destruction of that state at the hands of its own elites and its replacement by the present empire. Now at last I will witness the death of that wicked and evil empire.

• And even if as I suspect, the ideals of the dead republic are long gone from my own homeland, liberty and justice will live and thrive in the world still.

Elsewhere in our common American home.

From the imperial capital

Chris Herz
cdherz44@yahoo.com